Abstract

This paper represents an engagement in polemics, highlighting the inadequacies of contemporary theoretical and philosophical orthodoxies to address pedagogic change. In this case, the required change is in mathematics education, and is away from instructional practices based on teacher and textual authority alone to those that foreground student initiated inquiry and sense-making. My argument, from a poststructuralist perspective, is that teacher change of this sort is about much more than cognitive or intellectual reconstruction, as commonly theorised. Such change has an ontological dimension, it has to do with the constitutive effects of past and present learning and teaching environments on a prospective teacher's practice, it has to do with power relationships and the social construction of knowledge and identity. A poststructuralist analysis of the pedagogic environment in some teacher education sites suggests that, even here, there may be residual levels of inertia that jeopardise change.